by Stanislav Grof on July 30, 2010
The leading philosophy of Western science has been monistic materialism. Various scientific disciplines have described the history of the universe as the history of developing matter and accept as real only what can be measured and weighed. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are seen as more or less accidental side-products of material processes. Physicists, biologists, and chemists recognize the existence of dimensions of reality that are not accessible to our senses, but only those that are physical in nature and can be revealed and explored with the use of various extensions of our senses, such as microscopes or telescopes, specially designed recording devices, and laboratory experiments.
In a universe understood this way, there is no place for spirituality of any kind. The existence of God, the idea that there are invisible dimensions of reality inhabited by nonmaterial beings, the possibility of survival of consciousness after death, and the concept of reincarnation and karma have been relegated to fairy tales and handbooks of psychiatry. From a psychiatric perspective to take such things seriously means to be ignorant, unfamiliar with the discoveries of science, superstitious, and subject to primitive magical thinking. If the belief in God or Goddess occurs in intelligent persons, it is seen as an indication that they have not come to terms with infantile images of their parents as omnipotent beings they had created in their infancy and childhood. And direct experiences of spiritual realities are considered manifestations of serious mental diseases—psychoses.
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by Larry Dossey on July 30, 2010
What is spirituality? I consider it a felt sense of connectedness with something higher, a presence that transcends the individual sense of self. I distinguish spirituality from religion, which is a codified system of beliefs, practices, and behaviors that usually take place in a community of like-minded believers. Religion may or may not include a sense of the spiritual, and spiritual individuals may or may not be religious. I regard prayer as communication with the Absolute, however named, no matter what form this communication may take. Prayer may or may not be addressed to a Supreme Being. Many forms of Buddhism, for instance, are not theistic, yet prayer, addressed to the universe, is a vital part of the Buddhist tradition.
Even if prayer connects us with the Absolute, does it work in an empirical sense? In regard to healing, many systematic and meta-analyses have been published in the peer-reviewed medical literature assessing the quality of remote healing and distant intentionality studies. Nearly all these peer-reviewed analyses have yielded positive findings, suggesting that the healing effects of prayer and other forms of intentionality are real and replicable.
Yet these studies evoke sharp criticism. It is an article of faith in most scientific circles that human consciousness is derived from the brain, and that its effects are confined to the brain and body of an individual. Accordingly, it is widely assumed that conscious intentions cannot act remotely. The controlled healing studies call this assumption into question—and this challenge, I suspect, underlies much of the visceral response this field evokes.
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by Barbara Marx Hubbard on July 30, 2010
We are today living through a crisis that could not only destroy civilization and our essential life support systems, but also through a deeper phase-change in evolution itself. We are entering the first age of conscious evolution—the evolution of evolution itself, from unconsciousness to a conscious choice.
This phase-change began noticeably and violently when the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. A signal went through the social body that we now have the power to destroy our world—self-centered consciousness with this degree of power is not viable in the long run.
We are the first species who faces extinction by its own acts and knows it.
This is just the beginning. Through the advent of evolutionary technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, space travel, the quest for zero point energy devices and more, the human species is gaining powers it had previously attributed only to gods.
But not only can we destroy our own life support system, we can also catch a glimmer of our potential for a radical transformation of an evolutionary order.
When we imagine ourselves going through this crisis, hard as it may be, and project ourselves forward into the more distant future, even a mere one-hundred years, we see the emergence of a “universal species” capable of co-evolving with nature and co-creating with spirit. We learn to be in alignment with the drive in nature toward complexity and consciousness—on this Earth, in our solar system, and eventually in the galaxies beyond.
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by Rabbi Soetendorp on July 30, 2010
In the heart of the Jewish mystical tradition there is the parable of primordial light and the creation out of nothingness, en sof
At the beginning of creation Gd spoke Jehi Or let there be light
This refers to the primordial light that assisted Him in creating the universe and its fullness
When the inner decision was made to create the human being with his and her ability to choose, lehafdil
To differentiate between good and bad, the holy and the profane He needed as it were to silence this light
which had been created before the sun the moon and the stars were fashioned
Gd therefore assembled this light and put it in casks
He then proceeded to breath in, Tsimtsum, to be completely absent even for the smallest moment
In order to allow space to exist in which the human could develop her Gd-like essence independently
As expressed in the Divine intention
Let Us create Adam according to Our Image
Utter darkness reigned and tore with unending force at the just created human frame
And broke the vessels
All creation threatened to fall asunder
And Gd breathed out again and filled the universe again with His splendor
In that smallest entity of time when darkness was complete and all creation run the risk of returning to Chaos again
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The leading philosophy of Western science has been monistic materialism. Various scientific disciplines have described the history of the universe as the history of developing matter and accept as real only what can be measured and weighed. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are seen as more or less accidental side-products of material processes. Physicists, biologists, and chemists recognize the existence of dimensions of reality that are not accessible to our senses, but only those that are physical in nature and can be revealed and explored with the use of various extensions of our senses, such as microscopes or telescopes, specially designed recording devices, and laboratory experiments.
